"And I won't tell you how I accidentally cloned a Special Branch phone while we had spook visitors."
"Good."
"Good."
They clinked their coffee mugs together.
"There's something else, though," said Petra. "Something that worries me, although I don't think we're under surveillance."
"Which is?"
"If there are watchers outside, there's a record of you spending the night with the three hottest babes in town."
"I'll be sure to look exhausted when I leave."
"Perhaps we should carry you out."
The world was grey, and Richard was grey. Even the sunshine was grey. He sat outside the park, upturned veil-cap on the ground, with four coins inside: all he had.
"Spare any… change?"
But the busy feet had already walked past. In his listless state, he could not imagine walking that fast.
Am I going to die?
Perhaps at some point he could just let go of the world.
"There you go. Take it easy."
Coins spilling from a curled palm, a crouched woman straightening and walking on.
"Er, thank… you."
He woke up enough to check for streetcams. This seemed to be a blind spot, so he relaxed back against the brickwork. Other people walked past – workers heading for the station – and a few more coins tinkled into his cap.
Thank you. Had he said the words or merely thought them? I have to eat.
Retrieving the money, he jammed the cap on his head, and pulled himself up. His legs were soft, his knees painful. He made himself walk. Soon he was passing a row of shops, and in one doorway, a young woman kneeling on a grimy blanket. On her neck was a medical dressing, stained with pus. She was sobbing in near-silence.
No one was pausing to look at her.
That's not right.
He pulled out his coins, squinted as he counted, then put one third of the money back in his pocket. The rest, he carried over to her, and held out.
"Oh," she said. "Oh."
"It will get better."
"Thank you."
"Yes."
And then he walked on.
Finally, he passed a burger joint from which amazing smells drifted. He went inside, to where the fries-andburger aroma was so strong, he wanted to cry. He stood at the counter.
"No, mate. Sorry." The woman pulled back the basket of sauce-sachets, which were supposed to be free. "Not in here."
"I wanted to buy–"
"You're disturbing the customers."
Richard bowed his head, and shambled out.
At some point in his wandering he passed MI6 headquarters, familiar from movies: the sharp-lined ochre-and-green building, the laser turrets on the armoured gates. How could it be a Secret Intelligence Service if everyone knew where they worked? Then he stumbled on, passing beneath an old steel railway bridge, and found a stallholder who sold him a bar of Cadbury's and a bag of locust-flavoured crisps. The salt and sugar tasted fantastic; but afterwards, his background headache worsened, filling his skull, dampening his vision.
At some point, as he crossed a dirty park away from the shops, a girl's voice sounded. The effect was like a giant hand swatting him, making him stumble.
Opal?
"–that way," she was saying. "Like this. When your hands hit the wall, your hips are still well back, so there's time to get your knees up to your chest."
It was a big rubber-coated block she was vaulting over, not a wall. Other blocks stood around the grass, along with crash mats. Opal made it look easy, going over with her legs passing between her hands, landing in a quarter-crouch.
"If we had gek-gloves–" someone started to say.
"Freerun first, gekrun later." Opal slapped the rubberised block. "If you can't do a Kong vault freehand, you'll never manage the gloves and skates."
She looked around her small group of trainees. A couple looked about fourteen, her age; some were younger, some older. One lad might have been seventeen, starting to bulk up with muscle; but he stared at Opal with awed concentration.
"All right," she said. "Next we try to push our legs out into a pike, right? It's like a Kong, but you doubleslap and kick through into a Kash." She took several steps back. "When you start your run, make sure you're looking at– Richie?"
Faces turned towards him.
"Uh. Hi."
"Richie, you idiot." She was in front of him and grabbing his upper arms, as if she had teleported from where she had been. "What happened to you?"
"I don't… They got. Took. Jayce."
"He was bound to get arrested sooner or–"
"Not police. Someone else."
"Forget him. Have you been eating?"
"I–" He shook his head.
Her arms were holding him up. When had his legs grown so soft, unable to take his weight?
"Paul?" she said to the seventeen year-old. "Take over."
"Me?"
"Show 'em Cat, then dismount from Cat. Then a three-sixty Cat, all right?"
Paul's lips moved, and he nodded.
"Got it," he said. "Maybe a TicTac afterwards?"
"If you like, for fun. Only keep 'em safe. Everything on the equipment, nothing on the street."
"OK. All right, everyone…"
As Richard left, guided by Opal, the group began to jump at the upright blocks and cling like a kitten on a curtain who suddenly doesn't know what to do. It was a feeling that he knew inside out. But Opal's thin body felt strong as stone as she half-carried him towards the squat that suddenly was home.
In her consulting room in Elliptical House, Suzanne used her phone to contact the Brezhinski family. It was Mr Brezhinski who answered, his image brightening in the small display. He was probably thirty-something, made older through the facial lines of stress.
"Mr Brezhinski," she said. "Did you come to a decision yet?"
"If you could come here tonight… my wife will be home, because her bridge club cancelled the usual meeting."
"My expenses will–"
"We're not rich, but it doesn't matter. Please help her."
"Then I'll be there."
"Thank you. Thank you so much."
After a moment, his image cleared.
"Call Josh," said Suzanne.
In seconds, Josh was smiling at her in the phone. But there lines on either side of his mouth that reminded her of Mr Brezhinski.
"Hey," he said.
She remembered that she'd been given this phone by the police, and someone might be monitoring. Perhaps she should not have called.
"I'm glad to see you, Josh. So what's up?"
"Mindreader."
"If you like."
"Maria called again. That's my… wife. Wants us to meet up."
"And how do you feel about that?"
"Like I don't want to be psycho-interrogated, cheers."
"Sorry. But I've just arranged to meet the Brezhinskis tonight. At their home."
In the phone image, he looked at her, then his gaze flicked across to his right.
"Can I call you straight back?"
"OK, if you–"
The display was dark.
Why am I doing this?
She looked around at her consulting room. Perhaps the ambience needed to be warmer. Maybe throw some kind of cheerful fabric over the magnetometer. Or perhaps what she needed was to let go of her feelings for a married man.
But his marriage is in trouble.
Closing her eyes, she breathed in through her mouth and out through her nose, a deliberate reversal. Her mind stilled. When the phone chimed, she was calm.
"Hey, Josh."
"If you want a lift to Swindon, I can take you."
"Why? I mean, great, but–"
"I'm seeing her tonight. Maria. It's all arranged."
She should not be doing this, not even contemplating it.
"All right," she said. "Pick me up here, in Victoria?"
"One hour."
"See you then."
His image was gone.
Josh Cumberland.
Just the way his face vanished from her phone made her feel bereft.
You're a dangerous man.
But she was smiling.
Sitting in his car, parked near Grosvenor Square – if anyone detected him, they might think he was CIA, working out of the US embassy – Josh worked the phone's illegal app, hacking the monitor system long enough to slip his querybot into place, then restoring the register. None of the intelligence officers interested in Broomhall senior would know that someone else was searching using parameters that concerned them. This was not the most illegal thing he had ever done; but it was close.
He would have liked the querybot to notify him straight away if it found something; but a direct callback was dangerous. Instead, it would post its reports to an anonymous website, and he would check in, via cutouts. Now, with everything set up, he put the phone away, and thought about his travel plans for tonight. If the bot found something straight away, he would have to cancel everything else. He should not have said anything to Maria, or Suzanne.
"So why am I doing this?"
At the arranged time, he was parked by the kerb outside Elliptical House. Suzanne tapped on the door, and he opened it from inside.
"You had it locked," she said, sliding in. "Is that habit?"
"In an urban environment, I don't want people ripping open the door while I'm stopped at a red light."
"Oh."
"And before I get in, I check the car's unoccupied, with no one in the back seat. From a distance, I can see that there's no one hiding underneath, or behind other obstructions, like concrete pillars. It's habit, not paranoia."
"He said defensively."
"Shit." Then he laughed. "I give up."
He put the car in drive, told the navsys he wanted to get onto the M4, and let it pick the route. It diverted him away from heavy traffic, then back along the Thames, past Olympia and onto the Hammersmith flyover. Were it not for the blue road surface, this would have looked the same fifty years ago. But there would have been no trains or trizeps in the sky.
During the drive west, Suzanne talked a little about growing up on the northern outskirts of Paris, and he related his experiences as a young soldier, drying up when he came to Maria and the problems of a military marriage, the spouse at home and the soldier anywhere and everywhere, abroad for months at a time. Finally, he dropped Suzanne off outside the Brezhinski house and arranged a pickup point – a nearby pub, easy for her to walk to – in case she finished before he did.
Then he drove on to the pub where Maria would be waiting. It was called the Silver Dagger, and if he had been there before, he did not remember. He parked the car, unclipped his sheathed knife and stowed it in the glove compartment. From the upscale look, it would be a check-in-your-weapons establishment, the kind of place where they politely refused to return the weapon on exit if the person was too drunk.
Inside, the counter was polished copper, the lighting golden. Some of the drinkers were in business clothes. Two games of pool were in progress, all very casual. And Maria was sitting beside a narrow-faced man who wore an Italian-cut suit. Boyfriend or lawyer?
Lawyer.
The man offered a slender hand.
"I'm Charles Little, representing Ms McLean."
"You mean Mrs Cumberland." Josh shook hands.
"It's a difficult situation, and I sympathise. Would you like a drink?"
"I don't think so." Josh pulled out a chair, then sat square to them both. "We can dance around for hours or you can tell me what you want. In a single sentence."
Little looked at Maria, who nodded.
"Just show him," she said.
She was as beautiful as the day he had met her. Funny how it was obvious now, when so many times recently he had been unable to look at her, seeing only Sophie's body worked by machines, while her mind was software that no longer ran, the hardware brain a lifeless thing.
Little unfolded a wide-view screen and touchboard from his phone, and turned it to face Josh.
DECLARATION OF FORMAL SEPARATION.
Beneath the title, bullet-point summaries preceded the separate clauses, all clickable for the full legalese, to any depth required, with sideways links to any part of British law or beyond.
"Just tell me what it says about ownership of goods and shit."
"That's a separate addendum, which can be filled in now or later." Little pointed to the link. "If you don't fill it in, ownership defaults to a fifty-fifty split on pretty much everything. For a fast-track, er, culmination–"
"You mean divorce."
"–it's best to keep to a simple formula."
"Uh-huh. Interesting that we're meeting here instead of your office, Mr Little."
"I asked him," said Maria, "and it is evening."
"Actually, I don't really have an office." Little smiled. "We're a twenty-first century firm. Online anywhere, that's where we work."
The City banks would have disagreed, but they had tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, plus the need for physical security on their tens of thousands of servers. A small law firm with maybe a dozen people might entrust their entire business to cloud computing in the Web; Josh's clients could not.
His fingers flicked fast across the touchboard. There were input fields allowing complex specifications, or simple radio buttons for easy options. Tabbing rapidly through the document, he speed-read bullet points, clicked into two of the detailed pages, then shut down the auxiliary panes, returning to the beginning.
DECLARATION OF FORMAL SEPARATION.
After a long exhalation, he looked at Maria.
"No doubts? That's what you want?"
Curves of tightening muscle around her mouth.
"Yes."
Josh looked straight into her eyes and pressed his thumb down on the reader. He kept his gaze there as Little turned the screen back, sucked in a breath, then said: "You both need to authorise it."
Maria stared back, pushing her own thumb down. Then she broke, looking away, sniffing, not wanting to cry.
"Duly witnessed." Little pressed down. "Thank you. Your generosity is–"
Josh stood up.
So it's over.
He had seen too much to fantasise about might-havebeen. Too many dead soldiers who should have lived. Perhaps his eyes revealed his thoughts, because the lawyer's voice croaked into silence, and he pulled back, looking frightened.
Over.
Pulsing with the need for violence, Josh stalked out of the pub, praying that someone would get in his way, knowing it would be disastrous. Then he was by his car, shaking, the sky a deepening turquoise touched with sunset gold, pure beauty, while down here a rat rustled beneath the bushes, on dark soil containing a seething biomass of warring beetles and desperate worms, insects eating the babies of other insects, billions of organisms dying every second, some beneath the fangs and mandibles of predators, others killed and then sucked dry by their own kind.
It was a long time before he could get into the car and drive.
[ EIGHTEEN ]
Josh pulled in to the car park of the Red Stiletto, found the last slot, and parked. The pub's sign had once been a scarlet shoe – in the days when strippers worked here – but now was a glistening, stained blade. Inside, its main attractions were massive wallscreens tuned to sports channels. But there was no need to go in; Suzanne was outside, standing with folded arms.
"Hi," he said, failing to sound relaxed.
Her voice was nearly as tight as his. "What did she do?"
"Her and her fucking lawyer waiting for me, how about that? With a fast-track divorce, online and legal."
"What did you do?"
"Signed the agreement because… When it's over, it's over."
Saying it, he relaxed a little, though he was still sweating as if after a workout.
"My friend Miriam," murmured Suzanne, "went through something like that with her partner, and when it was over she said to
herself: 'Now it's time to let it go, remember what was good and accept the rest.' And she also said: 'You kept hold of someone who lasted for years successfully, so you can do it again, and maybe next time do it better.'"
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